The Clearing
By B.P. Herrington
He hews the fence line underbrush as he’s done since the sun broke through at dawn. He slashes young juniper and yaupon that grasp the blade as he pulls away, wax myrtle that spices the air when it’s torn. He rips down vines drawn taut from trunk to trunk and steadily the thicket brightens with greenness from the neighboring pasture.
His two young boys come down from the house, wading through the weeds and the clearing fog, each with a rake slung over his narrow shoulder. He sets them gathering up the cloak of pine straw that fell all through the autumn. The boys take fragrant heaps still slick with dew and carry them to the ground cleared for burning.
He hauls over tangled trains of shrubs and lays them crisscross on the heap. The boys come at intervals, too, tossing more tufts of needles. They all lay straw on wood to a height of six feet. He brings over the last of his chopping—but the boys are not bringing straw. He finds them back at the fence line with rakes aloft, surveying a patch of cleared ground, mesmerized. One points out rightly that the tine-marks suggest a vast plot of furrowed farmland seen from high above. He holds his reproach. They head back to the pile.
He pulls a stick of pine kindling from his back pocket and each boy strikes a match, snickering, to set it alight. Their father lifts the heap to make a little cavern in it. The boys peer in as he shoves the flame deep. He pulls his hand and the cavern closes. There is nothing—only a faint sweet odor—for a spell.
Then smoke bleeds out of the straw, thick but fluid, like mud roiled in water behind a darting fish. Stream becomes flow, then a column. The boys swing their arms to break the billows that swallow them up. The full rolling smoke rides the wind, carrying the sweetness of resin, the incense of a pine’s heart.
The thicket is now a land submerged. Deep white currents drown loblolly trunks and jagged hollies. Nothing is swept away, though, in this river of vapor, only hidden. The cloud, cleft by sunrays, burrows as deep in the woods as an echo. It pours through to the pasture, the dirt road, the creek on the other side of these pines.\ At the heap, yellow-white fire twists through the straw and guzzles the smoke. Green shrubs piled there steam and burst, hissing and whistling. The man and his sons retreat to the magnolia a little way off. The boys perch on lower limbs and nibble its sweetbay leaves. One of them points up to the house where the wife calls out from the front porch. Her voice is pinched by distance as she hollers, “It’s your mother on the phone.” He leaves the grinning boys and heads up the pasture to the rolling green yard.
His mother who lives a mile up the lane will be sitting in her well-worn wingback chair, her front windows open to the dove’s coo. She’ll be humming the alto line of a hymn, watching the doe and her fawns silvered with new coats browsing the beautyberries and clover. And just then, the farthest trees will have washed out in a blueish smudge and bands of haze will be breaking through, marching across the fields like farmhands at harvest. The land—the livestock feeding on it, the crops striving upward—is all the family has. She’ll have the telephone in hand, worrying as she always does, her gray eyes on the encroaching smoke.
In the kitchen, he takes the receiver and says, “No, Mama. We’re fine. Just clearing brush,” and goes out again.
The heap in the pasture has burned down to a glow, faded by sunlight, though its fumes still blur the fields behind it. His boys leap from the magnolia branches and twirl in the last wisps of smoke. He surveys the fence line and his meager progress that a season will undo with new growth. And when that time comes, he will hack the tangles and gather fallen straw for another fire, another pillar of smoke by day that will beckon his mother’s voice.
THE END